You don't often hear of a pedal steel guitar being someone's salvation. But that was exactly the case with Robert Randolph.

He went from being a streetwise troublemaker to top-rated musician, with a little help along the way from the Church and that guitar.

His is a story of beating heavy odds, of watching friends die or disappear while trying to find his own way out.

Randolph is a New Jersey artist finding his voice through an instrument seldom seen outside of Nashville studios and honky-tonks in the American South.

The results can be heard on the Robert Randolph and the Family Band's debut CD, Unclassified.

Not that long ago, all of this would have seemed like a dream to Randolph. His birthplace, Irvington, New Jersey, was a comfortable town but as he grew up he saw all that change.

"Things got really bad. I'm talking about murder and crime and drugs. As a child, when you're around all these things, you somehow become a part of it because you're curious," he explains.

With 2,000 students crammed into a space built for 800, Randolph's high school was one of the most dysfunctional in the state.

"I was a ringleader," he says. "We'd go to parties. A fight would break out. A couple of guys would get shot and I'd be running home. I was a bad kid, on my eighth life."

Stress built at home too. Both parents were involved in the House of God Church, his father as a deacon, his mother as a minister. But they divorced after Randolph began high school.

"It was just my dad and me, and with him sometimes not coming home too soon, a lot of times it was just me. So I'd have people over, or just hang in the streets, being a knucklehead."

Unlike most of his friends, though, Randolph never entirely let go of the Church. "I always liked going there," he explains. "At the same time, I would see my aunts and uncles, who lived nearby. I still had them to talk to.

"They'd drive past, see me on the corner and they never stopped praying for me. That helped turn me around."

Like everyone in his family, Randolph was musical. He got involved with playing at the House of God initially as a drummer for the youth choir.

After first getting a simple six-string lap steel guitar, he started out a bit cautious. "To be honest, I just wanted to check it out at first," he says. "I played it for a month and then I didn't touch it for another year because it was so difficult.

"Then, when I was 17, I went back to it and for some reason it started feeling really special to me. I spent hours practising on it."

Working with other young musicians, including his cousins and future Family Band members Danyel Morgan on bass and Marcus Randolph on drums, Robert quickly became a fixture at the church.

His playing developed rapidly within the tradition and he might have stayed on that course, content to play on Sundays and work day jobs during the week, if not for a tape that a friend loaned him one day in 1998.

That tape, a collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan tracks, hit Randolph hard. "The way he played his guitar, with so much soul, gave me a whole new outlook on music.

"Even now, sometimes when we're in the studio I'll be thinking, `Man, I want to get the greatest licks into this thing', but when you're thinking about getting a great lick instead of playing what you feel, it never comes out right."

Having learned how to tap into the emotions of the songs he played in church, Randolph was able to expand his range. "I started trying to apply the same natural, positive thing I found in gospel music to secular music, so I could still have that purity and energy that people can grab on to."

After numerous gigs, major labels clustered around him, contracts in hand, with Randolph opting in the end for Warner Bros.

"It's hard to record pedal steel the way we play it in church," he admits. "But with the engineer (and co-producer), Jim Scott, who's recorded and mixed everybody from Tom Petty to Celine Dion to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, his thing is to let the band play, and he helped us get the steel as it is."

NRobert Randolph and the Family Band support Eric Clapton at the Arena, Newcastle, tonight. The gig is sold out.